"No 'Mission Accomplished' banner has ever been flaunted about the Korean War. The conflict that [Pulitzer Prize winner] David Halberstam calls a 'black hole' in history (despite shelves of books about it) achieved its original objective. At great cost, military intervention reversed the communist thrust into South Korea, now a model of prosperity; North Korea remains an impoverished, Stalinist state. But in the 1950s, Americans did not perceive the Korean War as a success, and we have even more reason to view it with misgiving now, in light of our imbroglio in Iraq. As Halberstam recounts with mounting indignation in The Coldest Winter, some of the worst decisions in Korea were based on skewed intelligence. To be sure, it was military officers who massaged the facts they reported to civilian leaders. In Vietnam and Iraq, the pattern reversed, with civilians cherry-picking the intelligence to manipulate the military and the public. But in Halberstam's view, the Korean War set a 'most dangerous' precedent: 'the American government had begun to make fateful decisions based on the most limited of truths and the most deeply flawed intelligence in order to do what it wanted to do for political reasons, whether it would work or not.' Half a century later, we still have thousands of U.S. troops in KoreaŚnot a good omen for Iraq. Halberstam was one of the great war journalists of our time. In April [2007], five days after delivering final revisions to this book, he was killed in a car crash in Menlo Park, Calif. Among his 19 previous books is the iconic The Best and the Brightest (1972), probing how and why some of the most able Americans of their generation entangled the United States in an unwinnable war in Vietnam."ŚWashington Post